Although these two publications target quite different audiences, they both represent important interventions in the burgeoning field of early modern memory studies. Lees-Jefferies’s volume (part of the of the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series) seeks to introduce the student reader to the wealth of potential inquiries in the field of Shakespeare and memory, as well as extending scholarly debate with extended analyses of individual plays and poems. Strikingly, at the outset, Lees-Jeffries worries away at the thorny oppositions of memory/falsehood, memory/creativity, memory/selfhood, and memory/(theatrical) repetition. Hamlet comes to form the anchor text of the volume as a whole. Discussions of the tragedy recur at regular intervals and the play acts as a binding agent for the subsequent wide-ranging discussions. This textual emphasis enables Lees-Jeffries to explore broader inquiries into memory as moral and spiritual imperative, the practices involved in florilegia and commonplacing, the somatic figurations of memory in the period, and the ongoing cultural debate concerning kairos, or timeliness. In “Remembering Rome,” Lees-Jeffries concentrates attention upon questions of contemporaneous memorializations of performance, political iconography, and early modern linguistic practices to ponder the ways in which memory might be seen to operate within texts such as Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece. Disappointingly, the final account of Troilus and Cressida is curtailed as it initiates (but fails to pursue) a particularly rich inquiry into the questionable “value of classical exemplarity” (58) with reference to this text.
The subsequent account of Shakespeare’s history plays pays particular attention to questions of memory and performance history, as well as reviewing how characters in these plays (notably, Henry V) are driven by the desire to memorialize themselves with rhetorical strategies of “proleptic nostalgia” (74) or, alternatively, to erase deeds (e.g., Falstaff). Of particular interest here (and for the second publication reviewed here) is Lees-Jeffries’s concern with the disruptive status and function of the revenant in the construction of collective narratives of remembrance. The discussion of the role of memory in the sensual and erotic life of Shakespearean characters remains lively and thought provoking throughout, most particularly with reference to Orsino’s “addiction” (119) to the sensory experience of repetition in Twelfth Night and the way in which this play “explores the danger, but also the seductiveness, of erotic nostalgia” (130). One of the major concerns of this volume, which it shares with Gordon and Rist’s volume, is the importance of the materiality (“peculiarly dense signifiers” [159]) of memory in early modern culture — how memory might be stimulated again and again by the encounter and reencountering of specific objects (e.g., jewelry, paintings, carvings, books). The final discussion treating the sonnets and The Winter’s Tale considers equally important questions of lineage, inheritance, textual “eternizing,” and the threat of “memory dysfunction” (177) or sleeplessness in Macbeth. In general, if the rationale for textual selection (and reselection) might have been made more evident at the outset, the gains far outweigh this shortcoming in Lees-Jeffries’s volume, which offers an excellent introduction to the wide-ranging angles of vision upon memory in the Shakespearean oeuvre.
Unlike Lees-Jeffries’s volume, Andrew Gordon and Thomas Rist’s critical collection concerns itself more specifically with a scholarly audience. From the beginning, the editors underline that the quarry of this collection is material memory: “the arts of remembrance were tangible, legible and visible everywhere” (3). The collection has a tripartite structure (sections are entitled “Materials of Remembrance,” “Textual Rites,” and “Theatres of Remembrance”) and the determination voiced early on that case studies will “form the bedrock of this volume” remains evident throughout. Following the editors’ introductory discussion, Lucy Wooding’s discussion returns attention not only to Eucharistic doctrine in late medieval England, but most tellingly to the ways in which devotional practices of memorialization were often articulated in terms of the obligation and commitment to friendship, charity, and gratitude. In Wooding’s wide-ranging discussion, we are reminded that to remember might not only be a form of retrieval or meditation, it can also constitute an act of appropriation — depending upon the context in which it is expressed.
Robert Titler’s succeeding discussion of portraiture complements Wooding’s concern with the early modern desire for memorial practices and “mnemonic devices” (37), and examines how Tudor England hungered for symbols (such as painted likenesses) that drew their authority from conscious evocations of the past (in terms of genealogy, acquired rank, scholarly status, or classical learning, for example). Tara Hamling then turns to “monumental fixtures and furnishings” (59) as a field of inquiry over a period of some 100 years, beginning with the accession of Elizabeth. Tamling pays particular attention to the ways in which the symbolic organization of domestic spaces and artifacts in the early modern household might be seen variously to assent to, problematize, or challenge the separation of the sacred and the secular and, equally importantly, the construction of social identity in post-Reformation England. As this substantial discussion unfolds, Tamling makes the important point that “the recent turn to the material in humanities disciplines tend to prioritize the study of discourses surrounding the built environment and objects rather than being attentive to the intrinsic qualities of extant physical evidence” (62), and such a statement is not untypical in this impressive collection, which constantly urges the reader to reengage and challenge received thinking on the discourses of memory in early modern culture. Oliver D. Harris concludes this section with a lively account of the early modern fascination with the need “to identify and proclaim one’s forebears” (85), or the age’s cult of ancestor worship. Drawing upon a number of case studies, Harris engages with the broader narrative sustained in the collection as a whole that memorial practices in the early modern period were all too often enacted in response to fears of cultural amnesia, the management of religious change and social mobility, and/or a concern for posterity.
In the “Textual Rites” section, Thomas Rist makes a robust and persuasive case for considering an anti-Calvinizing emphasis in George Herbert’s poetics, and Tom Healy then addresses the question of historia in the Acts and Monuments and carefully highlights the driven nature of this chronicler’s intellectual undertaking. In the succeeding discussion, Gerard Kilroy continues this discussion of martyrs by addressing the example of Campion and the ways in which the Catholic martyr’s travails became deeply embedded in the contemporary controversy surrounding the Anjou match. In the final discussion of this section Marie-Louise Coolahan interestingly examines through case studies the construction of female authorship and, in particular, the (strategic) curation of wives’ writings by husbands in this period. The final section of this collection focuses particularly upon early modern (and modern) cultures of performance. Accounts of (sometimes imagined) performance in the modern period trigger Philip Schwyzer’s intriguing meditation (via Richard III, Hamlet, and Henry VIII) on “the active commemoration of the past through performance, and the passive memory imagined to be latent in the land itself” (180). This essay returns to the collection’s more general concern with the function, status, and implications of reiterative behaviors, here both at performative and narrative levels in Shakespeare’s playtexts.
Janette Dillon’s succeeding discussion on “scenic memory” is equally stimulating as she contemplates how certain theatrical moments might encourage audiences “to bring to it their memories of other similar images, onstage and off” (195). In particular, Dillon’s sustained emphasis is well placed and extremely timely: that each audience member brings to memorial operations “an individual set of tensions combining social grouping, religious afffinity and personal history” (199) — no cloning of the early modern audience here. The penultimate discussion by Rory Loughnane concentrates upon the tableaux of artificial figures in the torture scenes of the heroine in The Duchess of Malfi. Loughnane carefully juxtaposes early modern constructions of the funeral effigy in therapeutic terms with the harrowing inversion of this practice in the torments of Webster’s protagonist. Finally, Andrew Gordon returns to the question of memory in terms of revenants in early modern textual cultures, but most innovatively pursues this inquiry with reference to comic and satirical texts from the period.
In brief, while having quite different undertakings, both of these publications from 2013 make striking, thought-provoking, and timely contributions to early modern scholarship and are sure to excite further debate within the field of memory studies.
